Briefings with rotating robot models are supported in Descent 2 and have been for as long as I can remember. They do require that you install the correct supporting files, though. If you don't, some functionality may be skipped.

(11-10-2017, 02:40 AM)Kp Wrote: Briefings with rotating robot models are supported in Descent 2 and have been for as long as I can remember. They do require that you install the correct supporting files, though. If you don't, some functionality may be skipped.

Really? I've only ever heard people say that it's not supported by D2 at all, since it uses movie files to simulate those briefings. Mind telling me more about this? I'm wicked curious.

I misunderstood you before. Yes, the Descent 2 robot briefings appear to be movies that happen to look like robots, rather than being generated directly from robot data. However, if the Descent 1 code can do it, then we still have everything we need. With the source unification (mostly) complete, the code is even fairly accessible in Descent 2.

That would be quite something. The D1,5 mission is still years away from completion, but I had already resigned myself to making static robot shot slides for robot briefings. Making briefings with robot models in motion like in D1 would be an amazing feature to have. That would of course sacrifice the mission's vanilla compatibility, but there is very little reason to play vanilla when Rebirth is a thing anyway

On reading the code, Descent 2 supports this as-is, but only if EMULATING_D1 is true. This is true when reading a D1 mission, and false when reading a D2 mission. The briefing parser is a mess, but in principle it shouldn't be that hard to modify it so that a D2 mission can use a new directive to use this one D1 feature, while leaving everything else in D2 mode. With a bit of care, it would probably be possible to have the new directive skip over a nearby movie directive, if you wanted to be able to use a legacy robot-movie when the new feature is not understood. As I understand your use case, there's no need for that, since your problem is that there are no acceptable movies, so you need access to a game-generated polymodel. A basic implementation of the new directive would mean that users who run an unaware build would simply get no robot of any kind (but would still get the briefing text). Would that be sufficient for your use?

Could you link to a sample mission that ought to have one of these new robot briefings? It would ease my testing of the new directive if I had a briefing that is complete (other than using the new directive). In particular, having the briefing file already unpacked so I can add the new directive would be convenient.